Here’s my tribute to Neil, delivered at his funeral on 27th January 2026
‘There are few in his field whose leadership has had such a positive impact on so many people, from so many walks of life and in so many parts of the world.’ So wrote one former colleague in one of the many wonderful letters and cards I have received since Neil’s death. And if I single out that sentence for quotation, it is not because it was said just once; on the contrary, it sums up what many who worked with Neil have written, describing his extraordinary leadership skills. Others speak of ‘a moral strength and compassion that are rarely found in leaders’ and of how he believed in his people, challenging, motivating, mentoring and inspiring them to give of their best. ‘I owe Neil so much’, runs another tribute: ‘meeting him was, without doubt, the single most important event in my professional life.’ His particular brand of leadership had much to do with his personal qualities of sociability and interest in people, but was also founded in his vision, his commitment to delivering social justice for the poorest and his pragmatism in understanding that this was indivisible from empowerment and ownership. People followed him, in other words, because they knew where he was taking them, and why, and because he was interested in them. The same story is told by colleagues across 5 decades, from Shelter in the 1970s through to the Access Project and Langtree School in the early 2020s. He inspired enormous loyalty in many people, and more than one of his senior colleagues from VSO and CfBT continued to address him as ‘boss’ and ‘chief’ to the end of his life.
Work was where I met him, of course, in the middle of his career, when he was at the height of his powers. What struck me then, and continued to do so through all the years when we would talk at home about our respective jobs and the challenges our organisations faced, was his clarity of vision and the way he could take any discussion rapidly to the heart of the issue. He was the best mentor I ever had. He had an incredible ability to keep his brain completely unencumbered by detail. I was once in his office and noticed that his in-tray was empty. I remarked on this with some surprise, since my own was constantly overflowing. ‘I’m not meant to have things in my in-tray,’ he explained; ‘I’m the chief executive.’ It’s a lesson I’ve tried to bear in mind throughout my own career, but I’ve never managed to match his level of effortless delegation.
Neil had just five paid jobs in his life: research positions at Political & Economic Planning and Southwark Community Development Project, then Director of Shelter at 29, followed eight years later by VSO; and finally CfBT, which he joined 35 years ago when Fergus was six weeks old and where he remained till he retired in 2012, having utterly transformed the organisation and the lives and careers of many of its staff as well as the learners they served. But those salaried posts, impressive though his achievements in them were, tell only part of the story. He also gave large amounts of time to public and voluntary service. Elected to Camden Council at 24; Chair of its Housing Committee two years later; founder and first Chair of Homeless International; Co-Chair for many years of the Campaign for Freedom of Information; Chair of the Access Project, which helps disadvantaged young people find the confidence to get into top universities; trustee of numerous other charities including the Telethon Trust; governor of four schools between 2006 and 2022. No wonder he was made CBE and elected an honorary fellow of the Oxford University Department of Education.
Neil worked successfully, therefore, but he did not over-work. Being such an instinctive and sure-footed delegator allowed him to live the other parts of his life to the full. He was an ardent sportsman: captain of the York University rugby XV, later an enthusiastic and valued member of Belsize Park Rugby Club, a passionate golfer, keen sailor, and fond of a game of tennis as well, he had the misfortune to end up with a woman who understood literally none of these enthusiasms, though I did a fair bit of pretending in the early days; indeed I – along with Fergus, then a babe in arms – watched him play his last ever rugby game, at the age of 44, for the Belsize Park veterans team. One of his friends at that club remembers him as a pretty good rugby player, ‘a strapping lad’, athletic, and ‘a special human being’ who joined in the beer and the fun as well as the rugby. Sport for him was not so much about winning as about the fun of playing and the friendships made, especially on the golf course and in the Plockton Small Boats Sailing Club. And it was in friendship and his family that his life was grounded. He could have had a political career at national level – he’d have been ‘a good, meaningful politician’, as someone put it to me the other day – but he didn’t want to have to spend the time it would have demanded away from his family, and so he turned down the chance of a safe seat. He enjoyed his overseas trips, but he always said the best part was getting home again. He adored all his children – our two, Fergus and Izzie, and my much loved stepchildren, Alex and Flora – and he doted on his grandchildren Georgie, Moses, and Atticus. It is one of the many cruel blows dealt him, and indeed them, by Parkinson’s that he was not able to be as active a Grandpa or as present in their lives as he would have loved to be. He would have been so good at it, and they would have had so much fun together.
More than one person in the last three weeks has described Neil to me as a life enhancer. He enhanced my life with his love, his thoughtfulness, his intellect, his protective concern for me, his unwavering support for all my undertakings. So many letters have spoken of his kindness, his generosity, his openness, his warmth of heart, wit and charm. He loved a party, but he also loved just being with a few friends, talking politics, telling funny stories and laughing. He was a terrific raconteur. It was impossible to be bored in his company. He was one of life’s optimists, a man who never had a headache in his life (apart from the self-inflicted kind), who didn’t know what it meant to be depressed, who enjoyed life even after the Parkinson’s diagnosis: for years he called it ‘just a thundering nuisance’, and he decided early on to be, as he put it, ‘OK emotionally about it’. Engaging with the things he loved doing and the people around him, not dwelling on misfortune, was his way. And he was so generous. ‘For your 50th birthday,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go’. I chose Libya, and it was all planned for the November following my April birthday. But he couldn’t leave it at that. On my birthday he presented me with tickets for a whole other trip, this one to Verona and an opera at the Arena. We had the most wonderful time on both trips, and I felt, as always, completely loved.
It’s a commonplace in the death columns to read that someone has died ‘after a long illness, bravely borne’. I used to wonder what that meant. I know now. Behind the hackneyed phrase, in all probability, lies a long story of pain and loss, a gradual stripping away of physical and cognitive capacities, a narrowing down of a person’s world and the erosion of their independence. All the things that enable us to navigate the world as individuals, things that we take for granted every day, are gradually taken away. The shape of even the closest and most loving marriage, of even the happiest family, is altered. Roles and responsibilities are undone, shared memories are fractured and lost. The keenest intellect is taken apart, bit by bit. A man who once travelled all over the world negotiating with governments and international financial institutions can no longer find his way to the shop at the end of the road. And eventually he is taken from his home because he can no longer be looked after by those who love him best. All this, and much, much more, Neil endured, with courage and good humour, with determination, dare I say stubbornness, and I never once heard him utter a word of complaint. Not once. His essential loving nature survived even as his capacities and our shared world fell away: his face still lit up with his beautiful smile whenever he saw any of us, and he won the hearts of all his carers, smiling and chatting and being interested in them through the indignities and the pain. Thank you, Beata, Monika, Lolwethu, Roman, thank you to the carers of Lincroft Meadow. You and those like you are the unsung heroes of our age. Yet memory loss, though disabling and distressing, was not without its compensations: he proposed marriage to me twice in the last year of his life, and each time he was made very happy by discovering that I thought it a wonderful idea, so much so indeed that I had in fact already married him. I wouldn’t have minded how many times he proposed to me, in whatever state of health, I would have said yes every time.
But to end on a more upbeat note, you can’t talk about Neil McIntosh without talking about Scotland. Though he never lived there again after coming South to York University, he loved Scotland in a way that combined a sometimes deeply romantic passion with his characteristic clarity of thought. As in all the best relationships, he saw his native country for what it was: all its flaws, all its ordinariness, and all its beauties and its extraordinariness. He never lost his love of the east coast, where he grew up, and only a few years ago I took him on what turned out to be a final pilgrimage to those places of his youth – visiting his parents’ graves in Upper Largo, dropping in unannounced at their erstwhile home and receiving a warm welcome from the current owner, eating fresh caught fish and chips on the harbourside at Pittenweem, enjoying the beach at Elie – but the Highlands, and Plockton in particular, were where his heart lay. What his beloved Aunt Isobel and her husband Torquil did for him, a confused and unhappy small boy, during the year that he lived there with them gave him not only a much needed period of stability but a set of lifelong friendships formed at the primary school in the village, which enabled him to return year after year and slot back in as if he had never left. If we were cremating him, there’s nowhere other than Plockton that I would consider scattering his ashes.
Neil would have considered a funeral without singing a very poor affair. And so the Uist Tramping Song will shortly start up, and I want to ask you please to join in. If you don’t know the tune, it’s easily picked up. It’s a song that we associate very strongly with Neil: he sang it every year in Plockton village hall during the end-of-regatta concert, when he joyfully performed as part of the perhaps famous, perhaps infamous, certainly legendary Deep Sea Choir. Inherited in recent years by Fergus, history no longer relates whose song it was before it became Neil’s, but it’s easy to see why it appealed to him. It speaks of companionship, of walking, of complete disregard for weather conditions, and of so much that he loved about Scotland: the hills of home, the purple of the heather, the open sky, the call of sea and shore and the tang of bog and peat. And it invites us to sing in happy chorus, just as he did each year in the Plockton concert. I played and sang this song to him several times during his final days, when he could no longer speak, and it still made his eyebrows twitch. So let us sing it now for my beautiful, deeply loved, irreplaceable husband, and think of him in his happy place, on that stage in Plockton village hall, a bit hungover perhaps, his head filled with memories of a fortnight’s sailing and his heart full of the joy of friendship.
Melinda
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1 February 2026
